Ronald Evans’ EVA, The Last In Deep Space, Apollo 17, December 1972

Happy birthday to Christopher Clavius (March 25, 1538-February 6, 1612), the German Jesuit mathematician and astronomer. And now, ladies and gents, here are some fun facts:

History doesn’t know his actual German name. It could be Christoph Clau or Klau. It might be Schlüssel, which is German for “key”, which in turn is “clavis” in Latin. But really, it’s all speculation.

At the age of 17, Clavius joined the Jesuit Order, which was founded when he was a child.

While studying at a Jesuit college in Portugal, he excelled in math. Upon observing a total solar eclipse in 1560, he decided that astronomy would be his life’s work.

As a professor at the Collegio Romano in (you guessed it!) Rome, Clavius taught mathematics and wrote textbooks, including works on algebra, the astrolabe, and practical arithmetic and geometry. He also did his own version of Euclid’s Elements; that probably contributed to him being called “the Euclid of the sixteenth century.”

Clavius was the senior math guy on the commission that reformed the calendar in 1582. This gave us the Gregorian calendar that most of the Western world uses to this day. Check out my previous post on this subject.

In his astronomical works, Clavius was geocentric in his opposition to the Copernican model of the universe for reasons both scientific and scriptural. He remained an everything-rotates-around-the-Earth guy until near the end of his life.

He budged on the matter. A little. Well, not quite, maybe. Clavius and Galileo had a mutually respectful relationship, and Clavius was rather thrilled (in his cautiously Jesuit way) with Galileo’s groundbreaking observations of Jupiter’s moons and other wonders. In 1610, during Galileo’s visit to Rome, Clavius and other scientists confirmed the existence of Jovian satellites and the phases of Venus, which contradicted the Ptolemaic view of the cosmos. But the geocentrism-vs-heliocentrism debate raged on.

Clavius also seemed to take this skeptical-but-delighted approach to Galileo’s telescopic observations of the Moon’s rough surface. He wrote that “when the Moon is a crescent or half full, it appears so remarkably fractured and rough that I cannot marvel enough that there is such unevenness in the lunar body.”

Speaking of the lunar body, Clavius was honored with his own crater formation on the Moon, as you can see above. Largest to smallest, the craters are designated Clavius D, C, N, J, and JA. Fans of 2001: A Space Odyssey might recognize this lunar location as the setting for Clavius Base, a human colony featured in both the film and book.

Feel free to contact me if I’m getting any of this wrong. I’m no Clavius.

(Rice University/Wikipedia)

‘Space Station and Shuttle’ (1981) by Jack Olsen for Boeing Aerospace. From the book Visions of Space by David Hardy (1989)

Fascinating

Mike McDonnell (on matters of connectivity) 

Little did they know.

The launch of the Columbia for the STS-107 mission.  She would burn up during re-entry resulting in the loss of the crew.

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View of the earth and the moon from Apollo 13, 1970. Vintage chromogenic print on Kodak paper. Photography: NASA. Via Bassenge

So we terraform the planet; but the planet areoforms us.

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars 

In his defense, he didn’t know if it was the real life or just fantasy...

I'm gonna get a lot of hate for this

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